Salon.com > Joe McCarthy

11 heinous lies conservatives are teaching America’s schoolchildren

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:34:00 +0000

If recent elections have taught us anything, it’s that young Americans have taken a decided turn to the left. Young voters delivered Obama the election: the under-44 set voted Obama and the over-45 set broke for Romney. The youngest voters, age 18-29, gave Obama a whopping 60 percent of their vote.

Now Republicans have a plan to try to recapture the youngest voters out there: Take over the curriculum in public schools, replace education with a bunch of conservative propaganda, and reap the benefits of having a new generation that can’t tell reality from right-wing fantasy.

How well this plan will work is debatable, but in the meantime, these shenanigans present the very real possibility that public school students will graduate without a proper education. To make it worse, many of these attempts to rewrite school curriculum are happening in Texas, which can set the textbook standards for the entire country by simply wielding its power as one of the biggest school textbook markets there is. With that in mind, here’s a list of 11 lies your kid may be in danger of learning in school.

The GOP’s Ted Cruz problem

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:08:00 +0000

We’ve seen senators like Ted Cruz before. The historical comparison most commonly invoked involves Joe McCarthy, whose scurrilous red-baiting crusade in the early 1950s shattered the careers of innocent public servants and alienated McCarthy from his fellow senators, but also made him a folk hero on the right. Jesse Helms comes to mind too. The far-right North Carolinian was generally seen as more trouble than he was worth by his party’s establishment (there were those in the Reagan White House who not-so-secretly rooted for his defeat in a close 1984 campaign against Democrat Jim Hunt), but the intense animosity Helms stirred among liberals only enhanced his status among the conservative masses.

So it goes for Cruz, the freshman Texas senator who in his first two months on the job has baselessly asserted that Chuck Hagel might have received money from the North Korean government, reiterated his belief that there were 12 Communists on Harvard Law School’s faculty when he was a student there, and delighted in playing the role of ideological purist, even – or especially – if it puts him at odds with fellow Republicans.

Ted Cruz: I’m being silenced!

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 18:16:00 +0000

Tough-talking freshman Sen. Ted Cruz is attacking critics with a bold tactic: whining. The man who told the world, without evidence, that defense secretary nominee Chuck Hagel might have taken money from Hamas or North Korea now complains his critics are trying to “silence” him – but it won't work.

"Washington has a long tradition of trying to hurl insults to silence those who they don't like what they're saying," said Cruz.

Cruz made his comments at a visit to a Texas gun maker that manufactures assault weapons for the civilian market. “He’s our type of guy,” kvelled the firm’s marketing manager. Indeed.

It’s true that critics from Chris Matthews to Sen. Barbara Boxer have heard more than an echo of Joe McCarthy in Cruz’s evidence-free attacks on Hagel. In the New York Times Saturday, Boxer compared Cruz’s dark insinuations against Hagel to the Wisconsin senator’s unsourced tirades against alleged Communists in the 1950s.

"It was really reminiscent of a different time and place, when you said, 'I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such and such a date,' and of course, nothing was in the pocket," Boxer said. "It was reminiscent of some bad times."

Real-life body-snatchers

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

At first glance, everything looked the same. In the 1956 original, the possessed don’t act much different from their former selves. They don’t stare hollowly; they don’t shuffle. They’re just a little unemotional. And, really, what’s so wrong about that? In the 1950s, people cultivated blandness of affect. You went along to get along. The alternative got you labeled hysterical, with its connotations of effeminacy and madness. Hysterical, of course, is how Kevin McCarthy looks when he bursts out of the examining room in the opening scene and babbles warnings at a dubious shrink. Somebody give the guy a Klonopin. "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" has been read as an allegory of communism and an allegory of McCarthyism, though Joe McCarthy always seemed hysterical himself, with his jittering gaze and vigilante’s snarl. In both readings, the film locates evil in the collectivity, the passive, homogenous mass that stirs to action only when it scents the presence of one of the unpossessed. Can’t you see? They’re here already. You’re next!